Experimenting with student-centered science education

Student-designed physics class 2: the return of Phunsics

I’m happy to announce the return of my student-designed Phunsics class for the 2013-2014 school year. If you’ve followed our previous work, you might want to skip ahead to phunsics2013.wordpress.com or the pics below to see what we’re doing at the moment. For some discussion of how I set up the class this year, read on.

As in my experiment a couple years ago, I’m running my physics class as a student-organized maker-space where the teacher’s main role is to check for safety and procure supplies as needed. The projects and course topics are mostly up to what students are interested in building, making, and learning about in the field of physics and engineering.

I added a bit more structure this year compared to the last time I ran this class. We once again started off with the marshmallow challenge on the first day. This was awesome for having students experience failure and the need for prototypes in their projects. We then spent a day or two brainstorming three areas:

What content knowledge and skills should we expect to learn/want to learn as part of this physics class?

What tools will we use to communicate what we are doing with our families, friends, school, and world?

How will our work be assessed and graded for the school’s online gradebook?

The class of 26 students broke themselves up into teams to tackle these three areas. One group dove into our physics textbooks and the AP Physics guidelines to begin to search for big ideas for the class. A second group started brainstorming what sort of online sites they wanted to use for sharing their work. The third and surprisingly large group (I was sure no one would want to talk about grading policies) had some great conversations about how they wanted the course grade to be determined.

The results from our initial discussions about how to run this year’s course

After a few days of research and discussion, students came up with these guidelines for the course:

Each project group will have at least one author with a WordPress account who can publish to the class blog

Groups may create their own separate blogs/sites but will post links to these on the class blog

A reference list of major course topics will be published to the class blog by the team investigating our list of content knowledge and skill standards

Each project group will publish a weekly update to the class blog for the purposes of communicating and documenting their progress

At the end of each week, each group will either email or have a conversation with Mr. Ludwig about what progress grade they have earned for the week as supported by the evidence in their blog posts

All projects will be shared with the community both in online spaces and in at least one public event similar to our Phunsics Day 2012

What’s really fun is that their policy about weekly progress checks to determine their grade is very close to what I’d already implemented in my other classes using a weekly student entry in BlueHarvestFeedback. Either my students have caught on to how I like to grade or I’ve stumbled upon how they like to be graded, but either way we’re on the same page with our progress grades. I think we’ll need to have some more conversations later about how to derive their semester grade, but for now the progress checks are working nicely.

And now for the best part->

Here are the projects that my students are currently working on:

designing and building a quadrotor flying machine

a raspberry pi-powered robot of some sort (battle bot would be ideal, but we’re just learning how to program the pi)

the physics of weightlifting using Vernier Video Physics motion analysis

designing and building a spinning magnet and ferrofluid apparatus

building a flame tube for visualizing different wavelengths/frequencies of sounds

designing and building a two-seater powered go cart

designing and building a two-person cardboard boat destined to row across the swimming pool

restoring and improving the class hovercraft

Its early in the year, but many groups have already had some important successes. It’ll be interesting to watch as the year unfolds. Stay tuned and follow their blog for updates!

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I had an idea that I talked to Steven about, and he liked it, so I’ll ask you. My second semester at Mudd doesn’t start until the end of January, so I’ll have a couple of weeks after La Junta’s started up again before I come back to California. During that time, I would love to come in and give a three (or so) day “Relativity 101” to the phunsics class. Would you/the class be interested in that?

I would love that and even though the phunsics class is pretty democratic, I’m still the boss so lets do it. We’ll talk details later but let’s plan on Relativity 101 sometime in the second week of January. Awesome idea!